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This bug allowed some data from unlaunched projects to be made accessible via the API. It was immediately fixed upon discovering the error. No account or financial data of any kind was made accessible.
The bug was introduced when we launched the API in conjunction with our new homepage on April 24, and was live until it was discovered and fixed on Friday, May 11, at 1:42pm. The bug made accessible the project description, goal, duration, rewards, video, image, location, category, and user name for unlaunched projects.

As I read this I tried to analyze my feelings about this news. I have found that I am completely indifferent. Did someone get to take a look at unpublished, in-progress kickstarter ideas? May be. Does it matter? Not really.

I suppose that means I should expect the buzz around kickstarter to fade away until it settles into its niche. Sorta like eBay.

I'm sure one of those 7000 will flip out and try to sue somebody, but it would be meaningless.

As I read this I tried to analyze my feelings about this news. I have found that I am completely indifferent. Did someone get to take a look at unpublished, in-progress kickstarter ideas? May be. Does it matter? Not really.

Bear in mind that the US just switched to a "first to file" patent system, and since these projects hadn't hit the open stage yet, they were unpublished and thus not "prior art" unless published elsewhere.

This is kickstarter. It is meant for projects, not patents. If they were planning patenting something, they shouldn't have been pumping the details into website that is essentially public. Also, lets face it. If the innovations were so good, they could get funding through traditional channels. (saving up, selling car, mortgaging home, begging friends and family, venture capital firms, private venture capital investments. In that order.)

It is sometimes used by people with patents to raise money. (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/254316145/hyquator-safe-drinking-water-anytime-anywhere). Its too bad this project didn't meet its goal.

In those cases, the patent system is all the intellectual property protection they need. If somebody sees their Kickstarter campaign early, they're free to contact them to license the patent.

Most Kickstarter projects I've seen have been "I've done some cool art/music/OpenHardwareDesign, and I want to raise funds to print the book/CD/CircuitBoards", and those aren't really at risk if they're seen early either.

But the people who scan through kickstarter projects before the projects go public may very well be, in the good old spirit of Edison.And when the projects haven't been made public yet, they may very well be patentable by others under the new first-to-file principle.

Hmm. What defines "unpublished"? If Kickstarter was a dead-tree book company and their print-on-demand API had a bug that allowed stores to order copies of books the authors weren't planning to release until next year, would those books still be considered "unpublished" (as far as ideas went, since the topic is patents) despite the fact that several dozen copies were now sitting in the "new release" section of my local bookstore?

When Facebook exposes the private data of tens of millions of its users to the Internet, nothing happens. Nothing gets investigated. Nobody is held responsible. Nobody goes to jail, or somesuch. In fact, the market value of Facebook only goes up as a result of it exposing more and more data to its commercial partners and the internet at large. ----- Kickstarter accidentally leave a few WIP funding projects exposed to API users? Ooooh, that's so terrible! Ooooh, that's so wrong! ------- In the age of Facebook, which Julian Assange quite accurately called "the most abominable spying machine created in human history", a little slip-up like this shouldn't even make the news. -------- Kickstarter is a genuinely useful website. I hope it stays that way.

Isn't that the same risk one would take with any financial commitment to a speculative endeavour?The great thing about kickstarter, is that would-be world-changers don't have to jump through the firey hoops & controls that one or two venture capital suppliers would leverage over them. I really see kickstarter as the impetus to a competition-based market, in a market bent on quashing competitive practices; the little guy can step up with out Big Money's restrictions. Unfortunately, there is not yet any e

They don't need to. Kickstarter takes an entirely risk-free 5% cut of the proceeds of any successful funding campaign, and it's not like they have to pay credit card fees and chargeback fees out of that - those are entirely taken out of the project creator's share of the proceeds - nor do they have to worry about liability for the inevitable Kickstarter-based scams and failures to deliver thanks to some careful disclaimers in their TOS. If you take a look at the amount of money some projects have raised thr

That's because Facebook's T&Cs explicitly say that they are going to take anything you upload and sell it to anyone who wants to buy it. Every single Facebook user has clicked on something saying that they have read and agree to these terms. If they didn't actually read it before agreeing, that's not Facebook's problem.

Discovered and fixed on Friday, publicly disclosed on their blog on Monday. While it's not good that they had this bug in the first place, it's refreshing to see them take responsibility for it and explain it publicly and promptly.

This is obviously a bug, but if anyone is actually hurt by this, they shouldn't have been posting their idea to Kickstarter in the first place. Markets will not be affected by a pre-production, pre-funding idea becoming public knowledge earlier than it should have: Anyone who could act on such info would have done so when it became live, anyway.

If a company employee lets financial data slip to a non-employee (like, say, their personal stock broker), but does so on a public street, do you think any judge would then consider it public information? Just because it was briefly available to the public doesn't mean it's been published for the public to see/hear.

Does this even matter that much? Ideas are nearly worthless until they are actually practiced/produced. An idea for an amazing new device does not put one in anyone's hand. It is a starting point and goal. Besides, all of the ideas that are public on Kickstarter are there because they have yet to be implemented. They are there because ideas are cheap but their realization is not.

I love KickStarter and am a backer of various projects there. Also at IndieGoGo and RocketHub. Suffice to say, I love the concept.

That said... they're getting a PR hit over this? Give me a break. As it is, perhaps it'd be a good thing so that the public can vet projects before they actually go live for funding. That way KickStarter could avoid some things that they really should have gotten PR hits over.

Like scam projects. They got very limited exposure for that recently with the Mythic project, but a

I hadn't heard of Projektor before and had trouble finding it on the Kickstarter website. Here's their project page [kickstarter.com] - turns out that Kickstarter noindexes projects that have failed to meet their funding goal in order to make it harder to find them.

3. Ideas are freely available on Kickstarter. They do make that point. If you can't stand your ideas being known don't Kickstart them.

We are building a nano-scale on-farm USDA meat processing facility for our farm. We're using Kickstarter to fund it in part (see http://smf.me/ [smf.me] for details - tomorrows the last day May 15th). I'm open sourcing it. Go see my blog and see the floor plan, read about all the neat things we've developed to make it more energy efficient, smaller, lower cost and useful. If you want to do the same thing then more power to you. Share ideas.

We are building a nano-scale on-farm USDA meat processing facility for our farm.

I read your kickstarter page and think it's a great idea, but I take it when you use the term nano-scale you aren't actually talking about nano-tech. Buzzwords make me nervous, buzzwords used wrong make me even more nervous.

Why not just use the word "small"? It's not like you are doing molecular level butchering.

and ours is another step smaller by a large amount thus I use the term:

Nano-scale Meat Processing Facility

I thought about using milli-scale but while it would be a more appropriate term people, other than geeks like you and I, aren't familiar with the term milli despite the existence of millimeters. So nano it is. Eat small.:)

I am really looking forward to attempting to raise some money, but I'm torn between KickStarter, RocketHub and Indiegogo. Below is a short description of what our project consists of, it crosses genres, fiction and non-fiction, essentially we have two main thrusts to the website and our efforts: